Filling The Void: MAGA After MAGA

August 4, 2021 12:21 PM

Victor Berger IV, master video troubadour of our troubled digital age, microexpression microscoper and air horn tooter to the stars [previouslies 1234] has teamed up with VICE News to ask the pressing question: “MAGA Icons: Where Are They Now and Are They OK?” [slyt 28'41"]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (29 comments total)

Watching this while my partner experiences pre-labour, and boy oh boy does seeing these idiot grifters eat dust bring on the oxytocin. Scott Baio’s wife is a particular highlight.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:22 PM on August 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Featuring MeFi's own Scott Adams hypnotizing himself into believing his own bullshit.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:25 PM on August 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

That's a such a sad parade of grifters.
posted by octothorpe at 12:41 PM on August 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

Well, that was a half an hour I will never get back, but then I've got four years that I won't get back either. Why was Mark Zuckerberg at the end?
posted by Peach at 1:30 PM on August 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Why was Mark Zuckerberg at the end?

Brought to you by Facebook.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:34 PM on August 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

I'm not going to watch this video, but I certainly hope they're not.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:37 PM on August 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Is this a trick to make me listen to Scott Adams?
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:42 PM on August 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

That was a depressing video featuring depressing people.
posted by clawsoon at 1:43 PM on August 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

Ah so much schadenfreude all in one place. Surprisingly satisfying.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:46 PM on August 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

This mostly just made me feel really disgusted with myself for liking Dilbert in the early 2000s.
posted by pan at 1:52 PM on August 4, 2021 [18 favorites]

i still don't know where they are now, much less what "OK" might intend to describe about such people or whether they fit such a description. galling clips of shitheels remaining shitheels? check. i would welcome the schadenfreude, but did not find it here. short a jilting-of-granny-weatherall insight into the flash of their consciousness and conscience, if any, the moment before their deaths, i doub't i'll find satisfying shadenfreude with respect to featured parties.
posted by 20 year lurk at 1:53 PM on August 4, 2021

tldr: roger stone is fine; the drone-strike missed.
posted by 20 year lurk at 1:54 PM on August 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

This mostly just made me feel really disgusted with myself for liking Dilbert in the early 2000s.

Something often debated is how do you justify enjoying something created by awful people. When you consider that that scale goes up to Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein (folks whose awfulness directly ruined people's lives), and includes J.K. Rowling somewhere in the middle.

What I'm saying: Don't beat yourself up too much. Scott Adams is probably more on the garden variety asshat end of the scale.
posted by MrGuilt at 1:58 PM on August 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

I do not speak for anyone else (obv.) but a few minutes into this and no.

No, the only value in spending those minutes is the clarity: I don't need this shit in my life anymore, I am tired of all the shit, I'm happy to not think about these people and their shit.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:14 PM on August 4, 2021 [29 favorites]

Something often debated is how do you justify enjoying something created by awful people.

I've stopped.

Cosby and Weinstein ruined people's lives. Rowling is in the process of trying to get people murdered.

(I am biased.)
posted by mephron at 2:48 PM on August 4, 2021 [20 favorites]

The editing is pretty great, but it's also trying to invoke Betteridge's Law too soon. There's plate-of-beans thought-veins to mined about the dangers of Glad That's Over With! energy being premature, and potentially doing its own kind of harm...but it is pretty funny seeing terrible people yelling they're at the top of the world, juxtaposed immediately with sad little sponsor shoutouts to please check out Gold Bug Grift Dot Com Sponsor Code I-AM-SAD, so there's room on the plate to rearrange the beans is what I'm saying.

It also sparked the thought that in a (dare to dream) better generation a few decades hence, a lot of this material and editing will make a helluva movie akin to The Atomic Cafe.
posted by Drastic at 3:04 PM on August 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

I managed to watch several minutes without noticing that Vic Berger was involved and I found myself thinking "Gosh these guys sure took a lot of style cues from Vic Berger."

Pretty sure that's either a sign I'm losing my faculties or a sign that I'm not. Haven't decided which yet.
posted by Western Infidels at 3:10 PM on August 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I can only hope these people's lives are as awful over the next 4 years as they made everyone else's over the last four. Get fucked the lot of you.
posted by photoslob at 3:25 PM on August 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

Okay, started out with Alex Jones and Scott Adams, but then ... some guy? So I scrub through the timeline and those two and Roger Stone are the only ones I recognize. If I didn't learn who most of these people are the first time, I probably shouldn't start now.
posted by RobotHero at 3:51 PM on August 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Alex Jones definitely had the smoothest, most professional transition to... whatever his next grift is.
posted by clawsoon at 4:57 PM on August 4, 2021

Scott Adams is probably more on the garden variety asshat end of the scale.

Scott Adams is a guy who was resoundingly praised for expressing the idea that white collar work was dehumanizing. He gave folks an outlet when they felt bad despite being in an air conditioned office doing physically untaxing work, and as a result he decided every other tediously banal thought he's ever had must be equally valuable.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:31 PM on August 4, 2021 [27 favorites]

See also Anne Applebaum's reporting on Mike "MyPillow" Lindell. Spoiler alert, he's a huckster, a fraud, an ignorant grifter stealing from an implausibly naive audience, which makes him as American as apple pie:

When we walked outside, I thought that I might say something dramatic, something cutting, something like “You realize that you are destroying our country.” But I didn’t. He is our country after all, or one face of our country: hyper-optimistic and overconfident, ignorant of history and fond of myths, firm in the belief that we alone are the exceptional nation and we alone have access to exceptional truths. Safe in his absolute certainty, he got into his black SUV and drove away.

These disgraced and disgraceful MAGA shitbirds are as much a part of the American landscape as the cornfields of Iowa. Their ilk have been here from the beginning, these low-rent asshats are just the latest iteration. The only tragedy is that it took so long for so little comeuppance to arrive.
posted by peeedro at 7:08 PM on August 4, 2021 [25 favorites]

Don’t start the post-mortem yet. This isn’t over.
posted by panglos at 3:13 AM on August 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

Don’t start the post-mortem yet. This isn’t over.

Indeed.
The Big Money Behind The Big Lie.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:37 AM on August 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

Thank you. Zuck at the end was the icing.
posted by zerobyproxy at 6:53 AM on August 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

He is our country after all, or one face of our country:

He totally is our country. It'll take years for the court cases to lightly punish him for his blatant lies, it takes literally minutes for governors in southern states to take away rights of the oppressed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:01 AM on August 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Imagine thinking that coming up with the idea that it sucks to have a job is evidence of unique creative powers and mastery of persuasion
posted by dis_integration at 8:20 AM on August 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's telling that Adams mentions hypnotism repeatedly because I, hypnogogue, believe mass hypnosis is a demogogue's tool and is being used in broad daylight. You get large groups of people to turn off their minds, whether by fear or a frenzy of worship, and then you slip in your propaganda payload straight to the victims' subconscious, where it can't be blocked or reasoned with. A large part of the right's messaging is hits directly on the lizard brain, invoking fight or flight reactions and shutting off the neocortex. It's no accident, not in the least.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:07 PM on August 5, 2021

The joy this brought to my morning -- is beyond words, beyond consciousness, beyond the metaphysical. Thank you.
posted by zenpop at 7:28 AM on August 6, 2021 [1 favorite]